


First Contact

by Kemmasandi



Series: Transformers: JaegerTech [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Crossover, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-28 23:36:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kemmasandi/pseuds/Kemmasandi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>August 10th, 2013, is a date Ratchet will never, ever forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Contact

Ratchet is alone in his remote base when the first call comes through his comm network. It’s Rafael, and there’s a note of panic in the boy’s voice he hasn’t heard since before the end of the war.

“Look on the news, Ratchet – CNN, Fox, they’re all covering it – just  _look._ ” There’s a ‘please’ in there, a breathless gasp and a silence; it sounds as though he’s running.  “I’ve never— seen  _anything_  like it before, it just walked through the bridge like it was  _nothing—_ ”

Confused and deeply disturbed, Ratchet does so. ‘Bridge’ has to mean the Golden Gate Bridge: Raf is in San Francisco for the weekend, visiting relatives or so he’d told Ratchet.

The CNN site is a mess – traffic volumes through the roof, and even with his ultra-highspeed connection he finds it impossible to get anywhere. There’s an element of panic to it, comments loaded with entreaties to the humans’ gods everywhere he looks, but none that give him any context. The captions to videos which either aren’t working or haven’t been uploaded yet are scarcely better – something about a monster in downtown San Francisco.

Then the entire site goes down under the load, and he retreats in disgust.

Agent Fowler is next. He doesn’t miss a beat: “Ratchet, what the hell is that thing?!”

The BBC site isn’t much better, and Ratchet refuses to rely on Fox News out of principle. He switches to Al Jazeera, and immediately there’s a grainy video feed patched straight to his HUD of a city in flames. It’s an aerial shot, likely from a helicopter, and as it swings to one side he recognises with a chilled twist of his spark the mangled remains of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

Unlike the other newsfeeds, this one has no panicked reporter squawking over the noise of the helicopter’s engine.  It somehow makes the entire thing eerily surreal.

“What thing?” Ratchet asks, but even as he does so the smoke shifts and a… _thing_ shambles out between the skeletal ruins of a pair of twenty-storey tower blocks. There's no word in English capable of encapsulating the size of it. Behemoth. Leviathan. Too small. It’s a living mountain of organic flesh, streaked with thin rivulets of glowing blue and crowned with a curved blade of bone that juts out from its upper jaw. It opens its jaws and out comes a roar Ratchet can hear even several miles distant, even through the noise of the helicopter and the jets that fly like gnats around its skyscraper legs.

It raises a foreleg, a hand tipped with claws Ratchet thinks are each almost as big as he is, and swats at something almost lazily. There’s an explosion, a fireball, and one less jet in the air.

“There’s a goddamn giant monster rampaging around downtown San Fran,” Fowler snarls into the phone. Ratchet’s known him long enough to realise the man is on the verge of panicking. “Do you know what it is, any idea at all? Because we ain’t got a clue of how to stop it and there are more than a million people right in its path.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what it is,” Ratchet manages, his spark catching painfully in his chest as the creature  _walks right through a burning skyscraper like there’s nothing in its way._  “I’ve never seen anything organic that big before.”

Raf.

His protégé, his friend is out there somewhere.  

And once again all he can do to help is send his prayers.

_Stay safe._


End file.
